Chip Security Needs A New Language


By Sven Beyer and Sergio Marchese Safety- and security-critical systems, such as connected autonomous vehicles, require high-integrity integrated circuits (ICs). Functional correctness and safety are necessary to establish IC integrity, but not sufficient. Security is another critical pillar of IC integrity. Systems and products using ICs with security vulnerabilities ultimately undermine th... » read more

Is Your Functional Safety An Afterthought?


Imagine the air bag in your car not inflating during a collision or deploying without a crash during driving! These are two of the failure modes associated with the air bag in your car, none of which you as a driver have any control over. The severity of both these failures is of course very high, but which one would you rate as a higher hazard? The probability of getting into an accident is lo... » read more

ASIC/IC Trends With A Focus On Factors Of Silicon Success


“The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” ― Aristotle, 4th C. BC When Aristotle uttered this humble aphorism, he wasn’t telling us to throw up our hands and not bother with learning. He was encouraging us to continue digging deeper, to get answers and ask questions of those answers — that the thrills and rewards of study are truly without end. This is a big part of ou... » read more

Automotive, AI Drive Big Changes In Test


Design for test is becoming enormously more challenging at advanced nodes and in increasingly heterogeneous designs, where there may be dozens of different processing elements and memories. Historically, test was considered a necessary but rather mundane task. Much has changed over the past year or so. As systemic complexity rises, and as the role of ICs in safety-critical markets continues ... » read more

When Correct Is Not Enough: Formal Verification of Fault-Tolerant Hardware


Once upon a time, hardware functional verification was all about ensuring that a circuit would perform its specified functions under all legal input stimuli. Today, though, gaining confidence that a hardware design is correct is often not enough. Several industries, including automotive, medical, and aerospace, rely on safety-critical hardware to keep people safe. Other systems, for example, in... » read more

Shifting the Burden of Tool Safety Compliance from Users to Vendor


The security, safety and performances of autonomous vehicles, railways, aerospace, nuclear power plants and medical devices rely on electronic systems and their hardware components. Engineers use advanced software tools to develop complex hardware. Tools may malfunction, generate erroneous output and ultimately introduce or fail to detect systematic hardware faults that could cause hazardous ev... » read more

An Integrated Simulation Platform to Validate Autonomous Vehicle Safety


Autonomous driving systems rely upon sensors and embedded software for localization, perception, motion planning and execution. Autonomous driving systems can only be released to the public after developers have demonstrated their ability to achieve extremely high levels of safety. Today’s hands-off autonomous driving systems are largely built with deep learning algorithms that can be trained... » read more

Concurrent Test


Derek Wu, senior staff applications engineer at Advantest, looks at the need for doing multiple tests at the same time as chip designs become more complex, increasingly heterogeneous, and much more difficult to test at advanced nodes. https://youtu.be/-8inbjX_af0       __________________________________ See more tech talk videos here. » read more

The Rise and Fall of Synthesis Bugs in Safety-Critical FPGAs


For standards IEC 61508 / ISO 26262 / EN 50128 / DO-254. FPGAs are the dominant hardware platform in low-volume, safety-critical applications, including aerospace, and nuclear power plants. Modern FPGAs allow for the implementation of high performance designs with integrated safety mechanisms. This is driving adoption in additional industries, including automotive. Functional safety standard... » read more

Functional Safety: Art Or Science?


Nowadays, most hardware development projects deploy functional verification flows that include UVM-based constrained-random testbenches and formal verification. High design complexity, tough budget constraints, and short time to market are the norm, not the exception. Advanced verification is a necessity for many engineering teams. In our increasingly connected world, where billions of IoT devi... » read more

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